Racism vs. Hierarchies

Racism: The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as 'typical' of particular peoples.

 

In the US racism has been an issue for many, many years and calling someone a racist is a common derogation. But is racism actually the problem that it is painted to be? Certainly there are differences in cultures and value systems that divide what are rightly or wrongly considered to be different groups of people even though the members of a supposed group are hardly identical.  

For one thing, members of a group are likely to wish to remain members of that group, which includes their relatives and friends. In order to do so  they must adhere to the cultural factors and system of values of that group. One can't be a member of a particular group without visibly accepting many of the things that distinguish that group from others. Not only do those things demonstrate group membership but they also indicate to other groups that the same person, perhaps embracing alien or seemingly obnoxious values, is not a member of their group.

None of any of the group members wants to adopt many of the defining characteristics of other groups. They wish to maintain their own group characteristics but in a multi-racial society that can lead to conflicts. Some cultural practices that are deeply rooted in one group are despised and unacceptable to another. Some people enjoy cockfights, others are horrified by them. Teen-age brides are common among some groups but considered child abuse by others. The dominant culture will attempt, often successfully, to eliminate practices that they find abhorrent through the educational and legal process. They will look down on those that refuse to "assimilate" and since these outliers are likely to share not only cultural dimensions but also physical appearances what is called racism is a result.

Unlike in many other cultures, where the dominant one is by definition the correct one, parts of US society have taken up the quest for a situation where all are equal in some form. In legal terms this may well now be the case. In social terms it may not. That's because the real problem isn't in race or culture. The problem is hierarchies. In the economically mobile US it's the goal of every sentient being to have access to more wealth and more stuff. This is a new dimension in the human experience. 

European peasants remained peasants for their entire lives. So did their offspring. None of them received any sort of meaningful higher education. None of them were going to climb a social ladder, advance in hierarchy. Only when they left Europe for the Americas, Australia, South Africa, India, were they able to join an hierarchy that led to social advancement and wealth they could have never enjoyed in Europe. Of course they did this by eliminating or subjugating the native populations. 

The issue at hand isn't racism, it's being relegated to a lower level of the social hierarchy. This couldn't be more obvious. In the US, individuals of minority races or ethnicities are scattered all over the upper levels of the social hierarchy. They hold high elected political office, lucrative positions in business and industry, dominant places in entertainment. Of course this isn't true of all of them. In the US scheme of things, those at the top have climbed over those below them. For leaders to exist there must be followers. Being born to a leader and member of the upper level of the social hierarchy is the best ticket to success, now as it has always been, in the US and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, those with talent and drive can climb the hierarchical ladder regardless of their genetic makeup, just as we all must if that happens to be our goal. 

   

NIall Ferguson On Money

 

What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute. Money is worh only what someone else is willing to give you for it. An increase in its supply will not make a society richer, though it may enrich  the government that monopolizes the production of money. Other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"In God We Trust" it says on the back of the ten-dollar bill, but the person you are really trusting when you accept one of these in payment is the successor to the man on the front (Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the US Treasury) who at the time of writing happens to be Lloyd Blankfein's predecessor as the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Henry M. Paulson, Jr. When an American exchanges his goods or his labour for a fistful of dollars, he is essentially trusting "Hank" Paulson (and by implication the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke) not to repeat Spain's error and manufacture so many of these things that they end up being worth no more than the paper they are printed on.

 

The Ascent of Money, A Financial History of the World, Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, 2009, pgs 27-29 

Support Your Local Thought Police

 

Really Big Numbers

It isn't easy to grasp the magnitude of the numbers floating around today. For instance, the bill that intellectually hobbled US president Biden is soon going to sign for "covid relief" is supposed to total $1.9 trillion dollars. How much is that?

Written in numbers it looks like this: $1,900,000,000,000. There's an estimated 7 billion homo sapiens wandering about the planet's surface. Simple arithmetic indicates that if distributed equally among all living earthlings, each would receive $271. If the recipients were all US citizens, each Yankee would get $5,758.

This is new territory. For all of human history, except for the most recent years, the term "million" served to enumerate a round, almost impossible to visualize, number. A "millionaire" was a person with a stupendous amount of wealth. Not anymore. Billionaires now exist. 

Oddly, the application of large numbers hasn't changed in any other field but money and finance. It's still roughly 93 million miles from the earth to the sun, just as it has been for billions of years and likely billions more. A light year, the distance that a beam of light will travel in one earth year, is a little less than 6 trillion miles and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The number of cells in the body of the average human male is estimated to be between 35 and 40 trillion, unlikely to grow or shrink if humans remain in their current configuration.

Big numbers are needed to quantify the changes in the amounts of real goods, however. For instance, the US produces about 12,108,000 barrels of oil per day. Prior to Drake's discovery in 1859 the amount recovered was a little more than zero. 

In the case of fiat money, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank can enpixelate any amount of money since that money is an abstraction, no mints or printing presses needed. The money itself is tied to no concrete substance, like gold, silver or wampum. All that's necessary is for society to accept that the digital money in their accounts represents real value. Who knows what the upper limit on digital US money might be? Or is there even such a limit? 

    

K-9 Cop Arraigned On Assault Charge In Arrest Incident In Michigan

A Michigan state trooper has been arraigned with felony charges of assault for allowing a police K-9 to feast on a suspect last September according to this story and this one. Michigan State Police Director Joe Gasper said that trooper Parker Surbrook's actions during the arrest were "totally unacceptable". The supervisor who initiated the investigation of the incident "immediately recognized multiple policy violations" and filed a complaint.

Once again, failure to follow police policies were initially the central issue in the affair, not a violation of the law. 

 

 

BIGOT

Bigot,  n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

 

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911. 

Geriatric Leaders

The majority of Americans happily cast their ballots in 2020 for the position of US president for a man that was soon to be 78 years of age.  This man was running against the incumbent, who was 74 years old.

 During the frightening years of the Soviet Union pundits in the free world ridiculed the Russian Commies for selecting aged, withered fossils as their supreme leaders.

That may well have been true in some sense.

Nikita Krushchev became first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1953 at age 59.

Leonid Breznev replaced Krushchev in 1964 aged 58.

The next Communist in line for the top spot, Yuri Andropov, assumed office at age 68.

Konstantin Chernenko, a real Methuselah, took over the position in 1984 at age 73 and died in office 13 months later.

Mikhail Gorbachev took over for Chernenko in 1985 as a 54 year old youngster and is still alive today, having outlived the USSR political entity.

The Communist Party no longer rules Russia but instead is led by Vladimir Putin, who first held national office in 1999 at age 47.   

The Only Two Words You Need To Know: Asset Forfeiture

The celebrated freedom and liberty of the US democracy can be summed up in two words: Asset Forfeiture. This article from the on-line Reason describes but one example of another vestige of medieval society where authorities are allowed to simply confiscate the property of people uninvolved in criminal activity. The historical figure Hans Kohlhase has been celebrated in fiction and motion pictures for his reaction to his own brush with forfeiture to state authorities, circa 1532 Saxony.

 

The Reason article points out that states that allow asset forfeiture also have mechanisms that permit the owners of the disputed property to retrieve it through the legal process. In the case of Melinda Harris, her efforts to recover her automobile could not begin until the state of Massachusetts had begun legal proceedings to acquire ownership, which they did not do for 68 months, a period of time during which she was not only unable to use the vehicle but also saw it greatly diminish in value as it sat in statutory purgatory. 

 

While it might be so important that trans-sexual athletes be allowed to compete in scholastic sports that the Biden administration produced an executive order as one of the earliest in its existence, it still seems that the asset forfeiture scam, means that law enforcement in America, in 2014, stole $600,000,000 more from Americans than actual criminal burglars.

Minnesota Covid Death Trip

There are reputed to be 10,000 lakes in the state of Minnesota. If the name of each one of these lakes was changed to that of a supposed Covid-19 victim there would be at this moment 3,514 bodies of water named Long Lake or Mud Lake or Round Lake or Big Lake available to be renamed to honor someone who has fallen to the insidious virus. 

The University of Minnesota could, if it wished, provide a free ticket to a Gopher hockey game for an heir of each Covid-19 victim. In that case there would be 4,101 spots available for others, perhaps those in the early stages of the disease or in the process of recovery.

Examined in a different manner, for each Gopher stater that has succumbed to the respiratory illness, 818 remain in action. The deaths attributed to it make up a little more than .1% of the state's population.